That's correct, except that an Irmin client could choose not to reconcile if it would conflict, and just continue on with two active branches (presumably hoping for a future event that would help reconciliation). Bayou's a big inspiration for this system -- there's a filesystem under development that exposes some POSIX semantics using Irmin as a base. It should be possible to build rather interesting datastructures that go beyond conventional filesystems as well, though.

BTW, would be much appreciated if you could point to related work on the subject (papers, other projects, blogs, etc).

That'll certainly happen when we complete the research papers on the subject. It's a little out of scope for a blog post series that primarily focuses on trying to explain the stuff we're building.